Exhibition: 11 April – May 30, 2026
“Salutary Failures” is the title of an exhibition by Raphael Hefti organized by the Kunsthalle Basel in 2021 – one of the artist’s most ambitious and expansive statements to date. “Salutary Failures” might also be the most concise way to describe both the artist’s work as well as the philosophy that grounds it, which centrally revolves around a preoccupation with “failing” (errors, mishaps, mistakes) as a blessing in disguise – as a recipe, indeed a precondition, even, for making art.
At a time of dramatically diminished tolerance for the experimental mindset in society at large, Raphael Hefti remains radically devoted to art-making as a process of learning that is always also an adventure in unlearning – with spectacular, visually stunning results to boot, thanks to the artist’s probing inquiry into industrial and post-industrial modes of production that calls to mind both the magic of alchemy and the scientific method’s historical roots in aesthetic curiosity plain and simple.
Indeed, Hefti’s current exhibition at Mai 36 is perhaps his most aesthetically adventurous and confidently “artful” to date – a function of the greater freedom with which the artist has resolved to approach both method and material. (It is potentially also, in its oblique allusions to “places the artist has been”, his most personal – yet simultaneously cosmic in aspiration.) A sizeable amount of works in his most recent exhibition – specifically his aluminum “paintings” – were made in a purpose-built foundry located inside the artist’s studio, cutting out the middlemen who in the recent past have often been so pivotal to the realizing of his visions. They are a species of “homework”, in other words, simultaneously tentative and daring – and a reminder, in their way, of the necessarily private nature of so many discoveries made, almost always by accident, in the histories alluded to above. (Speaking of alchemy and the proto-scientific imagination: Archimedes’ exemplary “Eureka” moment remains the locus classicus in this regard, and there is something distinctly Archimedean in the dialectical tension, so defining of Hefti’s practice, between searching and finding – a quasi-reversal, one might say, of Pablo Picasso’s immortal and famously cocky dictum “je ne cherche pas, je trouve”.)
The artist has referred to the aluminum paintings in question (titled Les mains sales: the dirty hands of trial and error) as vessels, and they are not the only works in this exhibition conceived to contain something or other – consider, for instance, the neon-gas-filled glass sculptures – no matter how ethereal or imaginary: an echo, perhaps, of mankind’s primeval tool – the bowl. Coming face to face with half-a-planet-like painting of molten bismuth, of all possible materials, we reimagine Hefti’s horn of plenty as a cup to pour meaning from.
Text by Dieter Roelstraete.
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Raphael Hefti (1978, Biel/Bienne, Switzerland) studied at the Slade School of Fine Art (2009–2011) and the Ecole Cantonale d’art de Lausanne (1998–2002). Recipient of the Prix Mobilière (2015), and the Manor Kunstpreis Biel (2014), his selected solo exhibitions include Salutary Failures at Kunsthalle Basel (2021); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2017); On Core / Encore at Fondation Vincent Van Gogh, Arles, and OR OR OR ? at Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (2015); Nature More at CAPC, Bordeaux (2013); and Launching Rockets Never Get Old at Camden Arts Centre, London (2012). In 2025, he participated in Desert X, Palm Desert, USA.